California Grapples With Courts on Prison Overcrowding

The California Institution for Men in Chino, where, under Supreme Court orders, the state has reduced the inmate population.

Monica Almeida / The New York Times

By JENNIFER MEDINA

January 21, 2013

CHINO, Calif. — The gymnasium in the state prison here is hardly glamorous, just some concrete walls and a couple of basketball hoops.

But a year ago, those hoops were nothing more than ornaments. The gymnasium at the California Institution for Men was neither alive with the sound of thumping basketballs, nor used for workouts. Like any other space in the state prison system, it was used for housing. It teemed with far more inmates than it was meant to handle, and officials lined any open space they could with bunks crammed so close together that it was sometimes difficult to squeeze between them.

Those 100-plus bunk beds are now gone. Prisoners are no longer using an open bathroom, where the smell was barely tolerable. The conditions are certainly not luxurious, but for the first time in recent memory all inmates are sleeping in cells that were designed to house them.

Nearly two years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that California’s prison system was so bad that it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, the changes are, in some ways, readily apparent. The state is still a long way from reducing the prison population by 30,000, as the court mandated.

Nonetheless, Gov. Jerry Brown declared this month that “the prison emergency is over in California,” arguing that the federal courts should relinquish control of the state prison system and that placing more demands on correctional facilities was simply “nit-picking.”

“At some point, the job’s done,” Mr. Brown said during a fiery news conference on Jan. 8 in Sacramento, the state capital, where he defended the prison system. California has spent billions of dollars to comply with federal demands, he said: “We can’t pour more and more dollars down the rathole of incarceration.”

But a court-appointed monitor said in papers filed last week that Mr. Brown’s demand to end oversight is “not only premature, but a needless distraction” that could affect care for mentally ill inmates. The monitor cited dozens of suicides and long periods of isolation instead of treatment.

The leaky toilets have been boarded up at the prison in this suburban city east of Los Angeles. Inmates waiting to see a doctor are placed in holding pens that once doubled as cells in the hallways. Prisoners are being let out into the yard more often, as officers are less concerned that their time out of cells will inevitably lead to tensions.

With fewer prisoners, and less fear of tensions caused by overcrowding, inmates at Chino are getting more time in the yard.

Monica Almeida / The New York Times

Critics, including the lawyers who sued the state on behalf of prisoners, say that many of the changes are nothing more than cosmetic and that the system still does not provide adequate care to physically or mentally ill inmates.

“We’re wasting a lot of money on nonsense,” Mr. Brown said. “Everybody wants to send people to prison. Nobody wants to pay for it.”

Many advocates, had hoped that the court rulings would prompt more changes in the state’s aggressive sentencing laws, and submitted papers showing that there would be no uptick in crime rates if more prisoners were released. Officials have argued that they have already released the lowest-level offenders and that further releases would threaten public safety, even if there were no increase in overall crime.

“The state refuses to engage with the fundamental problem, which is that we incarcerate far too many people for far too long,” said Allen Hopper, a policy director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What has gotten us into this mess in the first place is the constant ratcheting up of sentencing laws.”

California is expected to spend $8.6 billion on prisons this year, the third-largest chunk of the state’s total budget, just behind public schools and health care.

It now has roughly 130,000 prisoners, with 119,000 housed in state prisons. That is a significant drop from 162,500 in 2006, the height of the crisis. But it is still nearly 10,000 more than what the courts said they would allow by a June 2013 deadline. Nearly 8,900 inmates are in out-of-state facilities. Most of the inmates shed by the state prisons were lower-level offenders who were sent to county jails.

State officials said that the independent monitors appointed by the courts showed in their latest reports that there were no “particularly significant problems to highlight,” and that in one report, the monitors said reductions in the waiting lists for medical care demonstrated “a dramatic improvement that is unprecedented.”

The governor went so as far as to argue that inmates received better medical care inside the prisons than they would once they were released.

For the first time in recent memory, all of the prisoners in Chino are serving their time in cells that were designed to house them.

Monica Almeida / The New York Times

In papers filed with the federal courts, the state outlined possible plans to release some prisoners early to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, but it argued that an early release would be dangerous and vowed to fight any court order demanding it.

Instead, the state asked the courts to abandon the requirement to reduce the total prison population.

“The overcrowding and health care conditions cited by this court to support its population reduction order are now a distant memory,” the state argued. “Any further court-ordered population reductions would threaten public safety and interfere with California’s independent right to determine its own criminal justice laws.”

The plaintiffs and other inmate advocates have reacted to the recent statements with dismay and fury. The lawyers representing the inmates said that in 2011, there were 43 “preventable” deaths involving prisoners who did not receive proper medical care in state prisons.

In one case, they said, an inmate’s skin cancer went untreated for nine months, and in another, a prisoner’s recurring symptoms of shortness of breath were “poorly managed.” After another inmate was given too much medication for his heart, the lawyers said, his blood pressure plummeted so low that he died.

“To pretend everything is O.K. is just crazy,” said Donald Specter, the executive director of Prison Law Office, an organization that has represented plaintiffs in the case. “There are still prisoners who are not getting the care they need, and there is no way they have timely access to a doctor.”

The reduction in overcrowding has not been uniform. Here in Chino, the prison is at 120 percent capacity. The prison population in Avenal, a state facility for men in Northern California, is at 160 percent of capacity — housing 5,000 inmates in a space built for 3,000.

The state says that the figures used to determine the capacity of the prisons are arbitrary and out of date. The vast majority of cells that on paper are designed for only one inmate can easily accommodate two, says Terri McDonald, the state’s under secretary of corrections.

“The system is constitutional systemically,” she said. “If you were to ask if there if there was an individual case that could be handled differently, that is going to be a problem anywhere. Anybody looking for perfection is going to be disappointed.”